


Three Years Long, One Year Quick

by richardthepassiveaggressiverooster



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Angst, BFFs, Cancer, F/M, Family Feels, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Mutual Pining, Recovery, Series Finale, Spoilers, but definitely still romance, call them platonic one more time and i'll lose it, nontraditional romance, they're in love okay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-02 13:14:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20276491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/richardthepassiveaggressiverooster/pseuds/richardthepassiveaggressiverooster
Summary: Sherlock knew what he’d been saying when he asked for Joan’s help to fake his death. The mechanics of it were fake, but the reality of it was not.





	Three Years Long, One Year Quick

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gorgeousnerd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gorgeousnerd/gifts).

> AHHHGHGHGHGHG THAT FINALE WHYYYYYYY MY HEARTTTTT
> 
> Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.
> 
> This first chapter is a quick breeze through the three years between the penultimate and final episodes. The next chapter will be what happened in the year before the finale's epilogue. I don't know if I'll write beyond that in this fic.
> 
> And did I mention SPOILERS?

Sherlock knew what he’d been saying when he asked for Joan’s help to fake his death. The mechanics of it were fake, but the reality of it was not.

Before Reichenbach, Joan and Sherlock had planned a transatlantic life together, working in London and New York alike. They had planned to baby-proof the brownstone together so that she could raise a child—and he had thought to help her, as if the son of Moreland Holmes could ever be a worthy father-like figure to whatever remarkable child Joan brought into her world. Their non-traditional life had been taking shape in a way that had allowed Sherlock to see a future with something he’d never before dreamed of having: a family.

Sherlock had even dared to think they’d grow old and die together.

His death was orchestrated together, but he fell off the bridge alone, and he met the private jet alone, just as he moved into his fabulously insufficient Italian home alone.

Joan’s letters smelled like her every time he opened the envelopes. He would sit in his chair late at night before slicing them open, deprived of all other stimulus, so that he could briefly feel as though he were home. Home was not the brownstone, but the scent of Joan’s lavender shampoo, and the faint human smell of her hands where they contacted the paper. He could read her words and hear her voice. But the letters were always careful and necessarily short and Sherlock was always alone when he finished them.

He missed others. Gregson, Bell, Kitty. But the size of that longing for their companionship was a twinkling star in the vast velvety darkness of Joan’s night.

Sherlock simply wasn’t as good without her.

He didn’t realize how much he relied upon her approval for his sobriety. How much he had come to care for himself, just because Joan cared for him. And when it became too painful to continue dwelling in his solitude, he instead dwelled in thoughts of heroin.

And then he got the twelfth letter, almost exactly one year from the date his life in New York had ended at Reichenbach’s hand.

“The adoption has been approved,” it said. “I’m going to have a son.”

The brief but genuine joy he felt for Joan was quickly followed by a constriction of the walls in Sherlock’s house. This was his reality. Not some imagined, remembered brownstone wherein he could pretend to be someone capable of raising a child with Joan Watson.

He was no detective without her, and now he could be no detective with her. The job was too dangerous. Their enemies too powerful. Her child too vulnerable. Joan too valuable.

Sherlock was dead.

Death felt like the deepest misery, such as he’d never felt before, and there was no solace from the Holmes who had died before him. There was nobody waiting for him in the abyss.

And all those previously fleeting thoughts of relapse he’d entertained became the zero space in which his dying soul was suspended.

Sherlock knew exactly what he was doing when he went to a dealer. He knew that he was hoping for death to become real so that he wouldn’t have to _feel_ the death anymore.

He was too smart a man to try the old dose that used to offer him comfort, back when he was using regularly. It wasn’t an accident.

Waking in the hospital was a moment of clarity.

Sherlock was still not dead, like it or not.

Heroin would fix nothing.

And so he would be a detective without Joan, taking himself into dark and deadly places to make the world a safer place for her to raise her son, and he would not let himself open another letter that only made his heart break again.

* * *

Joan had never needed to put so much work into existing before.

She existed well, of course, because Joan had goals, plans, and a life to live. She was still an asset to the police and committed herself to closing cases while she and her adoption lawyer slowly turned the cogs of bureaucracy. She found a child, not quite three years old when they first met, and she felt a wholeness that told her this was her son. Arthur Watson. Her boy.

Simultaneously, while whole, Joan felt like it was the wholeness an amputee would learn after losing their foot. She would never forget that it was once a simpler task to walk down the block. She would never be able to look at the prosthesis she built out of a talented nanny and brilliant assistant without missing the toes she used to have.

Every moment without Sherlock, in that first year, until Arthur came into her life, was occupied by a painful awareness of what was missing.

The brownstone was so quiet without him.

She painted over it. She rearranged. She replaced old appliances with safer ones. She added spaces for Arthur. But it was still Sherlock’s brownstone, the place where she had built a life with Sherlock, and she was whole in a limping kind of way. The nights were so much longer than they used to be, once her son was asleep. Once she could no longer keep busy enough she felt phantom pains of his absence and she always woke half-expecting to find Sherlock lurking outside her door.

There was no telling if Sherlock was okay, even when she got his letters. They were so short. He never offered details.

Eventually, they stopped entirely.

Joan couldn’t fear the worst when it had already happened.

There was little catharsis to be found in compiling her journals into the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which was destined to become a bestseller propelled by the tide of justice against Reichenbach. Joan felt a lot of things reviewing their times together. Sentimental. Melancholy. Proud. Furious. Wounded. But never _better_.

Even then, after it was published, Sherlock remained silent.

Was he really dead? After everything they shared together, Joan couldn’t believe such a protracted silence could mean anything else. He had meant everything to her, before Arthur. She thought that he had, in his way, felt the same about Joan.

Which was silly.

She built a life around her new reality and it was very good and very whole. Becoming mother to Arthur was even better than she’d hoped. She’d never needed Sherlock for that. She never came home to an empty brownstone. She never stopped working, setting new goals, and moving forward.

Even when she noticed she was bruising too easily. Even when Joan felt tireder than usual, even though Arthur was sleeping through the night. Even when she noticed the skin pocking strangely on her right breast, where the nipple had become inverted.

When she got the orders from her oncologist—a lump removal from her breast—Joan was too smart a woman to be optimistic about the odds. She was a doctor (and a terrible patient) and she had seen this process from within her white coat too many times. People did survive. She might survive. But she also might not.

There was some solace, she thought, in knowing that Sherlock probably hadn’t died. He’d simply opted out of the life Joan felt naive for believing mattered to both of them. 

He would probably live forever, alone against the world’s mysteries, making humanity safer while Joan prepared for a cancer diagnosis without him.

* * *

And in this slow, painstaking way, three years passed.

One moment at a time.

One heartbeat at a time.

Twelve letters in twelve months, and twenty-four months of utter silence over the Atlantic while a sense of incompleteness raged within Holmes and Watson.

It passed slowly, but it did pass.

Everything does, eventually.


End file.
